


then comes a choice

by statusquo_ergo



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hopeful Ending, M/M, The Gaang Learns How Zuko Got The Scar (Avatar)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25984069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: It sneaks up on him, sometimes.
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 599





	then comes a choice

**Author's Note:**

> Set between “The Ember Island Players” (s03e17) and “Sozin’s Comet Part 1: The Phoenix King” (s03e18).

It’s early evening, the orange-colored sky casting the water a brilliant shade of pink, long slants of light illuminating everything and throwing shadows across the town settled on the shore. The sky is vivid but not cloudless, the air warm but not stifling; many pieces making up a happy little place just a bit out of time. Lives, histories threaded together into a tapestry too big to take in all at once, big enough that everyone can stop and savor the parts they want, and everyone’s vision of the whole is a little different.

Everyone has come to this place together, but everyone is stuck here alone.

Zuko stands at the bedroom window overlooking the bay. A little to the side, down on the beach, the Avatar and his friends laugh and shout at each other, scuffling in the sand; every now and again there’s a loud thwacking sound, like someone hitting a ball with the flat of their hand. Maybe someone’s restrung the kuai ball net since the last time he was here, or maybe they’re playing some game of their own invention, acting as though they don’t have a care in the world. Sure, they might as well; that’s what this place is meant for, after all.

Closing his eyes, he takes a heavy breath. This isn’t the sort of night that belongs in the middle of a war.

Then again, they aren’t those sorts of soldiers, either.

The water ripples against the beach, and happy families walk hand in hand through the falling light, untouched by everything they don’t see, or hear, or know. Living happily enough in their illusions, their dreams. This world that is and isn’t, all at once.

The front door slams open as someone’s footsteps thud down the hall, skidding around corners, in and out of doorways. Sokka, probably. Come to ask him about some arcane facet of Fire Nation law that’ll allow him to win the game on a municipality-based technicality, no doubt.

Zuko sighs.

“There you are!” Sokka walks up to him with impressive poise for someone who was only moments ago barreling through the house like a wild tigerdillo. “Come on,” he says, clapping his hand down on Zuko’s shoulder, “we’re playing kuai ball down at the beach, it’s a total disaster. You’ve gotta check it out.”

Smiling weakly, Zuko leans forward onto the windowsill.

“Not sure I’d be much fun to be around right now.”

“Yeah, like we’re not used to that by now.” Sokka tugs him back from the window. “Aang keeps airbending his serves and Toph is determined to figure out how she can play a game where the point is to keep the ball off the ground, we need a little outsider perspective.”

Zuko smirks as Sokka winces.

“I…didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “But I still think you’d be better off figuring out how to play by yourselves.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Zuko watches the grin lingering on Sokka’s face twitch and fall away, his hand dropping from Zuko’s shoulder even as he takes a step forward toward him.

“You okay?”

Would you like me to tell you a story?

“Don’t worry about it.” He nods out the window. “Go back to your game.”

“You sure?” Sokka cocks his eyebrows. “I’m a pretty good listener.”

What a funny thing this is. How strange it is the way things turn out.

Zuko bends forward and rests his elbows on the sill. So is this what it’s going to be like from now on? His life? Surrounded by people who stand by him not because they can use him, who care for him not because they’ve never known any other way, but because they have, because they’ve seen him at his worst, his most despicable, and they’ve chosen him anyway. His value determined by something more than his birthright, a mere accident of circumstance.

After all this time, there are still so many surprises left to find.

“They have no idea what it’s really like.”

Pausing a moment, Sokka sets his hands down beside Zuko’s elbow, leaning into the wood. The sun has sunken down to the horizon by now, the half circle of light glittering off the darkened water below, deepening the color of his eyes.

“You ever think they might be better off that way?”

Living in ignorance, living in bliss; don’t you ever wish your life could be the same? Your world could be that simple?

“They’ll find out sooner or later.” Zuko narrows his gaze, his nails digging into his palms. “If the Fire Nation is ever going to fix all the damage we’ve done, they’ll need to confront everything that’s happened.”

Sokka nods slowly, an idle thoughtless rhythm. He agrees, surely he must, but of course things are never quite so easy.

As if Zuko doesn’t know.

“You know that not everyone is going to understand that what the Fire Nation did was wrong,” Sokka says. “Not everyone’s going to want to.”

Not everyone knows how to understand the world the way you do. Not everyone has had the chance. Not everyone has gotten to see the places where time stands still, the places where every life is made up of pictures of days long gone, put on hold until the future starts looking like something worth hoping for again.

Not everyone has gotten to find these things out on their own.

Zuko moves his arm away from Sokka’s hand and turns from the window, stalking far enough to put himself out of Sokka’s reach but not much farther.

“My father is a monster,” he says coldly. “They have a right to know.”

They have the right to learn from someone who’s seen it.

The wooden floor creaks as Sokka takes a step toward him, settles as he stops where he lands. The heat of his body is close, closer as he raises his hand toward Zuko, the edges of it fading as he drops it away. The silence is familiar, all the wounds they don’t bother dressing.

“No matter what horrible things he’s done as the Fire Lord, he’s still your dad,” Sokka says. “I… I understand if this is hard for you.”

Zuko smiles, mostly by accident.

“I’ve had enough time to come to terms with the truth,” he says. “Even if it took longer than it should have, I still managed to do it.”

Sokka hums softly, as though he understands what that means.

“You were just a kid,” he says. “You grew up with this stuff, it was all you ever knew.”

I’d like to think I’m better than that. But then again, wouldn’t we all?

Zuko grunts a terse laugh. “The hints were pretty obvious.”

Sokka does step to his side this time, laying his hand on Zuko’s shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

Are you sure you want to know? Do you promise not to think any less of me?

Zuko touches the puckered skin around his eye, sliding his gaze to Sokka and quirking his one good eyebrow.

Sorry you asked, aren’t you? It’s not too late to pretend you never saw anything. Not too late to pretend you never said a word.

Sokka’s grip tightens as he leans closer. Zuko doesn’t move away, even though he probably should.

“No,” Sokka murmurs. “Zuko, are you saying your father…”

You know I am. Don’t pretend you don’t.

Zuko closes his eyes.

“I spoke out of turn in a war meeting. My father had to teach me to respect his authority.”

Sokka jerks his hand back as his eyes go wide.

“Zuko, you— No one deserves that kind of punishment, least of all a child! And _least_ of all from your own _father!_ ”

“I know that _now._ ” Zuko looks at him irately. “But you said it yourself, it was all I’d ever been taught. The whole time I was growing up, everything was about the honor of the Fire Nation. My family’s honor, my father’s. Mine. Nothing was more important than that.”

Sokka only shakes his head, fumbling for some kind of meaning in the story, some moral he can pull out of it. Something to make it all worthwhile.

Don’t bother. The past is in the past; all we can do now is try our best to learn from it. Do better next time.

“He’s had his chance.” Zuko smiles bitterly. “People like that aren’t going to change.”

Shuffling across the floor, Sokka sits on the bed, his hands hanging between his knees and his head bent toward his chest, sinking, crushed under the weight of all the terrible things the world still has left to show him. You thought it was bad before? You thought you knew the edges of darkness? Everyplace that exists, someone else is suffering something you’ve never imagined in your worst nightmares. Everyone has their horror story.

Here on this island where the war doesn’t exist, let’s let ourselves wish we weren’t soldiers for a little while. Let’s pretend it isn’t all we know how to be.

“I knew the Fire Nation was awful,” Sokka says, “but it was always this thing one that happened to my family, this one thing I could hold onto to prove it, that they were all monsters, and then…nothing else mattered. Everything else they did was some kind of…foregone conclusion, every bad thing in the world, I figured it was because of them, because of the war, but I never thought…”

Zuko gestures satirically to his own face. “You never thought someone could do something like this?”

“I never thought someone could commit that kind of evil up close.”

Those vicious, piercing eyes, so like his own and still so different, so delightedly cold; his own father, looking for any excuse to punish him, taking his chance to disfigure him, to mark him in his permanent exile, teasing the chance of a redemption, a promise he never intended to keep, a prize that was never really his to bestow…

Zuko presses his lips together and takes a deep breath.

It’s been a long time now, but these things have a way of sticking with you.

“He’s always had a soft spot for me.”

Sokka folds his hands together and looks up at him.

“Zuko, I had no idea.”

“Yeah,” Zuko scoffs. “That was kind of on purpose.”

Sokka hums softly. “I guess I can see how you’re okay with what has to happen.”

Restoring balance to the world. Giving everyone a second chance to start the clock up again, to get on with their lives. Move on to tomorrow.

Murder.

Zuko shoves his hand through his hair, scraping along the skin, sharp, stinging, drawing blood maybe, maybe not, maybe just enough to burn. How are the history books going to write this story? Patricide? The vindictive plot of the greedy heir? The spite of the vengeful fugitive? The runaway with his heart in his throat, tears in his eyes, standing on the battle lines as though he’s got something to prove, as though he deserves to survive when so many others haven’t been so lucky. As though he’s _better_ than them, as though he’s something _more._

Sokka touches his fingers to Zuko’s wrist, stilling the cut of his nails against his scalp.

“Are you?”

We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess.

Zuko lowers his hand slowly, shaking his head.

“I don’t really have a choice.”

Out the window, out in the dark, happy families walk up and down the shore, talking and laughing, the gentle hum of a world without memories, a world of blissful ignorance. The willfully blind, the unerringly silent.

Sokka takes his hand from Zuko’s wrist and slides it around his shoulders.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I think it was really brave of you to join us. To help Aang, even though you know how this has to end.”

If you could go back and do it all again, would you? Would you rewrite history? Do you think you could make a difference?

Zuko raises his hand to hold Sokka’s and clasps it tight.

After all this time, would you choose to lose all the things you’ve found?

Sokka turns his hand over to lace their fingers together, and they stand together in the dim glow of the torch lights along the beach.

We can be sad together, you and I, but that doesn’t mean we get to stop fighting our demons. We don’t get to cover up our scars.

“Will you stay?” Zuko asks. “When this is all over, is everything going to change?”

“You know it is.” Sokka drops their hands to step around in front of him, looking him in the eye. “That’s why we’re doing this. For change.”

“But will you?”

Will you make me a promise you can’t keep? Will you tell me that when this life ends and a new one begins, when I’m walking down that road into the great unknown, will you tell me I won’t be alone? Will you swear it?

Sokka pauses a moment, then reaches for his arms again.

“As long as you need.”

It won’t be like you imagined it. The darkness has fallen and it’s going to keep falling, and even when this is all over, when all is said and done, it’ll be hard to see the light.

Zuko nods his silent thanks, stepping into the hug Sokka offers him, fitting them together as he wraps his arms around Sokka’s ribs. Sokka holds him close, pressed cheek to cheek.

It’s bittersweet, this future we’re marching toward, the things we’ll have to do and the choices we’ll have to make. When all our vices and virtues have been washed away, when all that’s left to paint across the walls is the unvarnished truth of who we are and who we aren’t, we’ll stand together, you and I, until the end comes for us and there’s nowhere left to go but forward.

Your love may be a fragile thing, but it’s there inside, I know. Go on, take a look.

I’ll be here.


End file.
